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America's 100 Deadliest Highways

With summer driving season here, so is the deadliest part of the year on the road. The Daily Beast crunches the numbers to determine the 100 interstates most likely to generate a fatal wreck.

A quick disclaimer: If you’re driving right now and reading this, put down your smartphone and come back later—please.

Summertime, when America traditionally takes to the road, carries with it a more somber tradition—“the 100 deadliest days” of the year for drivers,
according to Susan P. Owings, co-founder of Road Safe America. An astounding 50,765 fatal accidents occurred in June, July, and August from 2004 to 2008, according to data from the National Highway Safety Administration. While fatalities have been steadily decreasing since 2005, 37,261 motorists and passengers nonetheless lost their lives in 2008.

These lives were lost disproportionally: Some roads are more dangerous than others—reckless or distracted drivers seem to congregate on certain highway corridors, while poor road maintenance is another common cause of collisions. We crunched the numbers for five years of accident data, courtesy of the NHSA, from nearly 250 stretches of interstate highways to find out which roads are the most deadly, mile-for-mile.

Some notes: Each interstate was broken into stretches within a single state. We measured fatal accidents, rather than total fatalities, which we then divided by the number of miles of that stretch. And any ties that may appear on these raw numbers driving these rankings are only because of rounding.

Where should you buckle up extra tight? Some of the worst performers are also among the best-known sections of pavement in the country: